The Texas horror and the Republican dilemma

As I write this, it appears that the tormenting of Kate Cox is over.  Condemned by Texas law and judges to continue a pregnancy which endangered her future ability to have children and her very life, she has apparently left the state to secure an abortion elsewhere.

But the case exposed, yet again, the profound horror of forced-birth laws.  If Cox had stayed, she would have ended up as a human sacrifice offered up by ignorant barbarians lost in the darkness of medieval taboo and superstition.  The men who now rule Texas are gibbering primitives incapable of grasping the realities revealed by modern medicine, thirsting to reduce women to slaves and blood offerings on the altar of the foul and savage god conjured from the fever dreams of their sputtering, rotted-out brains.

So long as these vile laws, these disgusting violations of the personal freedom of women and girls, continue to exist at all, there will be an endless parade of cases like this -- more ten-year-old rape victims, more women suffering from dangerous pregnancy complications which Bible-befuddled legislators and judges are too stupid to understand.  Of course, it's an outrage for any woman or girl to be forced to go through with an unwanted pregnancy, even if there are no such additional evils heaped upon it, but it's the most extreme cases that capture the public's imagination and clarify the issue best.

Some Republican politicians have realized the electoral problem this creates for them -- and have responded with abject displays of the cowardice which has come to define them.  Nikki Haley's statement was typical:

"We don't want any women to sit there and deal with a rare situation and have to deliver a baby in that sort of circumstance any more than we want women getting an abortion at 37, 38, 39 weeks," Haley said, emphasizing that she is "pro-life."  "We have to humanize the situation and deal with it with compassion."

This is a completely binary question.  There exist only two possible answers.  Either a woman in Cox's situation should be allowed to have an abortion or she should not.  There can be no in-between or halfway position.  Haley needed to declare clearly which view she holds.  Her response was pure evasion and fudging, reflecting a desperate wish that the question would just go away.

But it won't go away.  From now to November there are bound to be more such horror cases in the news -- and as the election approaches, Democrats will flood the country with ads reminding voters of the real-world consequences of the Republicans' forced-birth fetish.

But what if the Republicans were to renounce forced-birthism?  The majority of voters already consider the Democrats, overall, to be more extremist and crazy than the Republicans, identifying the former with views on crime, "reparations", trans ideology, illegal immigration, etc which repulse and outrage most Americans.  If the Republicans could convincingly repudiate their opposition to abortion, surely the result would be the biggest red wave ever, with Republican landslides all over the country?

Unfortunately for them, it's not that simple.  Fundamentalists and traditionalist Catholics remain militantly opposed to abortion and want to see it outlawed.  They're a minority of the US population, but not a small one, and for many of them, this issue is their biggest reason for voting Republican.  Yes, a Republican party that accepted abortion would win millions of mainstream voters who would feel that they could finally vote against the Democrats' lunatic positions without endangering an essential freedom -- but it would also alienate much of its own voting base.

A similar dilemma applies to the Republicans' Trump problem.  Trump does repel many centrist voters who would support a more "normal" Republican like Haley or Christie.  (This is not just my opinion.  Recent polling shows that 7% of the electorate are "Biden-Haley voters" -- in a Trump-Biden race they would choose Biden, but in a Haley-Biden race they would choose Haley.)  But much of the Republican base idolizes Trump and would regard any other nominee as a betrayal -- and Trump himself, if someone else were to get the nomination, would surely rage and rant and turn his followers against the hapless candidate out of sheer spite.

That problem, at least, will go away when Trump dies.  It's hard to see what would make the abortion dilemma go away.

It's fundamentals like this which I think are most relevant to projecting the likely outcome of future elections.  Polls a year in advance are not very predictive because the parties aren't yet trying very hard to engage the voters' attention, and wild-card events could change the dynamics of the election in the meantime.  But the effects of the abortion issue, post-Dobbs, seem likely to remain very stable over time.